Christine Fallert Kessides

Christine Fallert Kessides is the Urban Practice Manager in the World Bank Institute. The Urban unit provides capacity development support in key topics of the urban agenda, including land use planning, municipal finance and governance, urban services, public safety, and resilience to disaster risks and climate change adaptation.

The unit uses 3 main approaches: facilitating knowledge exchange and connectivity among urban practitioners and networks, structured learning (especially distance learning courses), and hands-on engagement with country and city counterparts on their capacity development challenges, in close collaboration with the World Bank's Urban operations units.

Prior to joining WBI, Ms. Kessides was the Lead Urban Economist and Urban Program Leader in the Water and Urban unit of the World Bank's Europe and Central Asia (ECA) Sustainable Development Department where she managed urban and municipal analytical work and projects in Poland, Russia, Turkey, and the Western Balkans. While Advisor in the Urban Anchor, she wrote the Bank's 2000 urban and local government strategy, Cities in Transition, initiated and managed the Urban Research Symposium series, and represented the Bank in the UN Task Force on MDG Target 11 (the slum upgrading target).

She has served on the core team of two World Development Reports: in 1994, Infrastructure in Development, and 2003, Sustainable Development in a Dynamic World, and was a member of the 1997 World Bank Group's Working Group on Infrastructure Finance. Prior to joining the infrastructure and urban sectors, she was a country economist for Hungary and Romania, and for Burkina Faso. She joined the Bank as a Young Professional, after working for the Ford Foundation in Botswana.

A US national, Christine received her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University and a Master’s in Public Affairs in International Development from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University.